Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) The award-winning "Meine Schwester Maria" or "My Sister Maria" is a 1.5-hour documentary movie from 2002, so this one has its 15th anniversary this year. The director is Oscar winner Maximilian Schell and here he gives us an insight into the life of his older sister Maria, not an Oscar winner, but still a huge star and we find out about her glory days, but also about her life as an old woman suffering from dementia. I would say overall it was competently executed here I guess. You get a good insight most of the time, sometimes even a great one. Still it felt to me to be honest as if the documentary was good, but nowhere near as good as it could have been. This has to do with strange, almost pointless, supporting players here and forgettable plots you could almost say that cost the film quite a bit in the authenticity department. I personally believe that Max Schell would have had a great deal more and more interesting anecdotes to tell about his sister that certainly also would not have been too personal and could have turned the film into something truly special. So it is a success, but not a great success I would say. But maybe you also need to be a bigger Maria Schell fan than I am to really get the love in these 90 minutes. I like her, but I would not say she is anywhere near my personal favorites. That description actually would fit better when it comes to describing how I see Max Schell. Shame there is nobody out the to make a similar documentary about the late actor sadly, he was truly tremendous during his peak. But back to this one here, I think there are some flaws with the execution and concept in terms of the approach and general idea overall, but also many good moments and I believe the positive in here is more frequent than the negative. Go check it out.

movie reviews Maria Schell a famous Austrian actress is filmed at the age of 75 having suffered possibly a stroke living in her ancestral home.This is a semi staged documentary highlighting problems in the last years of her life--her mental dementia foremost--but also her being broke and spending her time ordering expensive items advertised on television---she has 11 television sets on which at least according to the documentary she watches her old movies.Her brother apparently wealthy and also a famous actor steps in and manages her life as creditors close in.There are lots of film clips.This is clearly a movie for fans of the actress. I had never heard of her and her very limited mental abilities allow nothing but the shallowest conversation. But it is still touching and sad.Don't Recommend unless you know this actress

jm10701 This is a creepy movie.It pretends to be a documentary, but it is totally scripted, totally staged, and feels totally false. It also pretends to be a tribute to Maria Schell by her younger brother Maximilian, and it is filled with so many clips from her old movies that it could make even a devoted fan pray for relief - but in actual interactions between the siblings he's so critical of her and so overbearing that it borders on abuse. Even the supposed ravages of her old age are faked and exploited for the camera, which is really infuriating.This is a phony, cloying, suffocatingly obsessive movie that indulges Max Schell's obvious obsession with older German female movie stars. It's much like his equally creepy and equally phony "filmed" interview with Marlene Dietrich (only the audio is Dietrich; the video is faked with stand-ins), made practically against her will a couple of decades earlier, not long before she died.After watching this supposed tribute, I cared less about Maria Schell than I did before, and I lost what little respect I still had for her brother. He was fabulous in Judgment at Nuremberg, but he's come a long way down in the five decades since then.

marcomeyer When Maria Schell retired to her parental homestead in the Austrian alps, her once so glamorous internationally acclaimed movie star life changed from stardom to quiet oblivion. There she occasionally met her family - and the bailiff. Her mental health made it difficult for her to make the difference between fiction and reality. She ordered several expensive TV sets, chandeliers and so forth, not realizing that she was flat broke. Generous to herself and friends alike, she spent millions until the sale by court order of all her belongings including the family homestead was imminent. It was her famous brother Maximilian Schell who at least wanted to save the farm and the surrounding land for the family. The debts were so high and the compulsory auction so near that he had to sell his beloved art paintings in order to gather the astronomical amount of money needed to avoid the loss of his and Maria's childhood home.Maximilian Schell portrays this sad and obviously final episode of his beloved sister Maria's life in a very special docu-drama filled with retrospectives of her movie work. These movie clips are the bright side of her life, contrasting the real life, which was not so real to her anymore. Or was it? Maximilian reflects about the meaning of life and if his sister may have retired in a sort of mental way station claiming the paradise as long as she was living and not only after she would die.This movie actually is an insider movie, a very personal treatment of a family tragedy and full of love, very soft-spoken. The warm and close relationship between brother and sister, both famous actors, is touching without being kitschy. It is knowingly heart-moving, though. The movie's red line is the short distance Maria is forced to walk from the living house to the "hut" where it all began, where her mother gave birth to her and her siblings. Maximilian urges her to walk this way every day and when she would finally reach the hut, everything would be OK. Throughout the movie we observe Maria Schell advancing step by step until she finally stays in front of a stove trying to make fire. She does not notice that she loses control over the fire. All is burning down.Viewers expecting star chitchat will be disappointed as much as those tabloid story hungry masses who played the shocked ones when it turned out that the story of Maria Schell in poverty and mentally demented was true. Maximilian Schell's movie does not show this. It is a documentary, cleverly combined with quite obviously acted scenes. A set up, maybe the last camera, light, action for his sister. The film ends with Oliver's Theme, composed by Oliver Schell. It is a merry melody instantly returning the thoughtful viewers back to the really real life.